The American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s (MSK) Thoracic Surgery Oncology Group (TSOG) completed its first clinical trial involving 330 patients who have ground glass lung nodules identified on a CT scan.
Lars G. Svensson, MD, PhD, became the 104th President of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS). He officially succeeded Yolonda L. Colson, MD, PhD, in a presentation during the AATS 103rd Annual Meeting in Los Angeles.
Dr. Svensson obtained his medical degree in 1978, an MSc in 1983, and a PhD in 1986 from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. His cardiology, general, and vascular surgery training was at Johannesburg Hospital, followed by cardiovascular surgery training at Cleveland Clinic and Baylor College of Medicine, including a cardiothoracic surgery residency. He was Chief of Cardiovascular Surgery at Houston Veterans Affairs Medical Center and worked with Drs. DeBakey and Crawford at Baylor College of Medicine, where he was also Assistant Professor of Surgery. Following this academic appointment, he was then Clinical Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Tufts University, and Instructor at Harvard Medical School while working at Lahey Ho
A study at the Yale University School of Medicine looked at data from the National Cancer Database for this six-year period and compared the 5-year survival rates for patients who had surgical resection and patients who elected to have SBRT. Overall, 30,658 patients were identified, including 24,729 (80.7%) who underwent surgery and 5,929 (19.3%) treated with SBRT.
Each year, 3 out of 10,000 babies will be born with critical left heart obstruction (CLHO). Most infants born with severe left-sided cardiac defects, such as CLHO, require at least three major open-heart surgeries before the age of 5.
Acute kidney injury (AKI) represents a major morbidity following cardiac surgery; and, when moderate or severe, it is strongly associated with postoperative mortality. Approximately one-third of adults and up to half of all children who undergo cardiac surgery develop some degree of postoperative AKI.
To compare the outcomes of patients receiving lungs transplanted after undergoing ex vivo lung perfusion (EVLP) versus those transplanted conventionally at the Toronto General Hospital, Aadil Ali, PhD, and coauthors looked at 14 years of data from the Toronto Lung Transplant Database.
In 2011, Makoto Suzuki, MD, and a team of associates from across Japan embarked on a long-term study of the safety and efficacy of sublobar resections for ground-glass opacity–dominant (GGO) peripheral lung cancer.
Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common type of birth defect and the leading cause of mortality from birth defects, affecting about 1% of all live births per year in the United States. With advances in medical therapies and surgical techniques, the survival outcomes of patients with CHD have improved dramatically over the years.
Although the On-X aortic valve and apixaban have been approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), they had not been approved to be used together. Between May 2020 and September 2022, the PROACT Xa randomized, multicenter, open-label trial compared the direct factor Xa inhibitor apixaban (Eliquis) with warfarin in patients with bileaflet carbon aortic valves.
Lung transplantation is routinely performed at night because of the unpredictability of donor organ procurement. Late start-times for complex operations such as lung transplantation have been associated with adverse outcomes.
As thoracic researchers consider the myriad effects of COVID-19, they are looking at the impacts of the disease on patients and treatments, as well as care and treatment during the pandemic.
The American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. A wealth of data has shown that diversity in the physician workforce improves patient care, safety, physician well-being, and innovation; and fair compensation is essential to culturing a diverse workforce.
Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related deaths in North America. Although cigarette smoking remains the main risk factor for lung cancer development, the importance of environmental factors such as pollution and poor air quality is becoming increasingly recognized.
Hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) is a birth defect that affects normal blood flow through the heart. As the baby develops during pregnancy, the left side of the heart does not form correctly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that each year about 1,025 babies in the United States are born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome—about one out of every 3,841 babies each year.
In comparison to data about video-assisted (VATS) lobectomy, retrospective data about robotic-assisted (RTS) lobectomies show such benefits as decreased postoperative pain, lower mortality, shorter chest tube duration, shorter hospital stays, and reduced incidences of postoperative pulmonary complications.
In a recent CTSN trial, the addition of tricuspid annuloplasty (TA) at the time of mitral valve surgery (MVS) in patients with degenerative mitral regurgitation (MR) and moderate or less tricuspid regurgitation (TR) reduced the composite rate of death, reoperation for TR, or TR progression at two years.